Sam Borden of The New York Times tells the tale of how “Champions League” — the anthem composed by Tony Britten specifically for the UEFA Champions League competition — has gained as much popularity as the soccer it introduces since it debuted 20 years ago.

The Lords of European soccer, Borden writes, were seeking an image upgrade after some dark, dreadful years, blotted in particular by the Heysel tragedy at the 1985 European final in which 39 fans were killed:

Craig Thompson, a former managing director at the marketing company, TEAM, said there was a negative perception of European soccer at the time — “there had been a lot of hooligan incidents, fan disasters and all that,” he said — so the aim in creating the Champions League was to “class it up.”

The lyrics are in three languages, and the work is something of a riff from Handel’s “Zadok the Priest.”

Borden notes the original recording was in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chorus.

“I wasn’t trying to pretend to make a piece of art,” Borden quotes Britten as saying. “I was concerned that it did what it was designed to do.”

Neither did it contain the irritating drums in the clip below, something you thankfully won’t hear when Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich line up at Wembley Stadium Saturday.

The writer known best for his mountainous study of the 1988 presidential race, “What It Takes,” was remembered just as much this week for his equally memorable magazine work.

Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was 62 when he died Monday from lung cancer, was especially hailed by fellow authors and journalists for his 1986 Esquire magazine article, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”

It was like so much of Cramer’s best work: unflinching, drawing out the visceral, honest truth about a man. Williams’ career drew to a close in 1960 — marked by the last home run he hit in his last at-bat that John Updike famously wrote about for The New Yorker — and Cramer describes the aftermath:

And what was Ted left with? Well, there was pride. He’d done, he felt, the hardest thing in sport: by God, he hit the ball. And there was pride in his new life: he had his name on more rods and reels, hunting guns, tackle boxes, jackets, boots, and bats than any man in the world. He studied fishing like no other man, and lent to it his fame and grace, his discerning eye. He had his tournament wins and trophies, a fishing book and fishing movies, and he got his thousand of the Big Three. Jimmy Albright says to this day: “Best all around, the best is Ted.” But soon there were scores of boats on the bay, and not so many fish. And even the Miramichi had no pools with salmon wall to wall. And Ted walked away from the tournaments. There wasn’t the feeling of sport in them, or respect for the fish anymore. Somehow it had changed. Or maybe it was Ted.

Tom Junod called this “the greatest magazine profile ever written,” and recalled the impression it made on him before his own journalism career was underway:

It didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard, before or since, and in that sound was freedom… freedom to sound like yourself, freedom to sound like your subject, freedom to do what it takes to make both a subject’s experience and the experience of a subject come alive. Sure, there were plenty of sound effects and exclamation points, but it wasn’t Wolfean — it was Bellovian, the work of a first-class noticer who knows that writing “like an angel,” or however it is that writers are supposed to write, is a small thing next to writing, well, like a mensch.

Alex Belth uses the same word in his homage, calling Cramer “a mensch of the highest order, a good man, as well as a wonderful storyteller,” and linking to plenty more, including an acclaimed profile of Jerry Lee Lewis. Here’s another Esquire sports piece from 1987, “Fore Play,” that Belth posted Friday, and he has another remembrance from David Hirshey, Cramer’s editor at the magazine, on what happened when the Williams piece he submitted was far too long.

Joe Posnanski cites Cramer’s 1995 story for Sports Illustrated on Cal Ripken Jr. surpassing Lou Gehrig as his discovery point for a writer who later became a friend:

After I read that piece about Cal Ripken — which includes the magical word “fotobooger” and ends with a seemingly simple story of Ripken signing autographs that gets to the heart of why he mattered so much to people — I had to read everything Richard had ever written. It was only then that I read the Esquire Ted Williams story, which I had heard about and copied but had never really read. Of course, the story was more than great. It was life altering.

ESPN The Magazine writer Ryan McGee recalls how Cramer had done his homework — on him — before their collaboration on a NASCAR-produced documentary about Dale Earnhardt Jr.:

“Now, Ryan McGee, there’s something you need to know about me that you can’t learn by reading the inside of that book jacket. And it’s the one thing you don’t want to hear.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about NASCAR, and I surely do not know a damn thing about Dale Earnhardt.”

Cramer’s 2001 biography, “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” was more than 500 pages in length, and it received mixed reviews. While many of Cramer’s friends and admirers praised it, others were taken aback by the author’s searing investigation of another lionized, but flawed, baseball legend, especially DiMaggio’s shortcomings as a father and ill treatment of others.

As Ian Jackman wrote for the London Review of Books:

Cramer isn’t someone you’d want picking through the debris of your life . . . He tells these stories straight and unsanctimoniously. He does not catalogue DiMaggio’s misdeeds just to run up the score against him.

Dave Kindred on the sportswriting character that the recently-departed Jack Klugman made famous:

“Anybody can be hard on Lance Armstrong. Oscar was hard on Christmas: ‘Don’t talk to me about Christmas, will ya? All that sticky, phony goodwill. I’d like to get a giant candy cane and beat the wings off a sugar plum fairy.’

“When Felix complained that Oscar poured ketchup on salad, Oscar said, ‘So? I like ketchup. It’s like tomato wine.’

“Wait, what’s Oscar doing to his arm? ‘Sterilizing the wound.’ Felix was aghast: ‘With beer?’ Oscar: ‘It’s got alcohol in it.’

“The pair went to the horse races at Belmont Park, Oscar at the $100 window, Felix fretting about his own bet. ‘If he doesn’t win,’ Felix said, ‘I lose everything.’ Oscar harrumphed: ‘Yeah, the whole two dollars.’ ”

Evgeny Morozov Tweeted the other day that:

True story: Harvard’s library subscribes to “Journal of the Philosophy of Sport” but not to “Journal of the Philosophy of History”

The author of “The Net Delusion” is embarking on a Ph.D. in Harvard’s lauded history of science program, so this must have been an odd discovery. But not nearly as odd as what he included his next Tweet, a link to an abstract of a paper published in a sociological journal:

‘Dressage Is Full of Queens!’ Masculinity, Sexuality and Equestrian Sport”

The author is Leeds Metropolitan University professor Katherine Dashper, and here’s her forever obsession:

“Attitudes towards sexuality are changing and levels of cultural homophobia decreasing, yet there remain very few openly gay men within sport. As a proving ground for heteromasculinity, sport has traditionally been a hostile environment for gay men. This article is based on an ethnographic study within a sporting subworld in which gay men do appear to be accepted: equestrian sport. Drawing on inclusive masculinity theory, equestrian sport is shown to offer an unusually tolerant environment for gay men in which heterosexual men of all ages demonstrate low levels of homophobia. Inclusive masculinity theory is a useful framework for exploring the changing nature of masculinities and this study demonstrates that gay men are becoming increasingly visible and accepted within once unreceptive locales, such as sport and rural communities. However, this more tolerant attitude is purchased at the expense of a subordinated feminine Other, perpetuating the dominance of men within competitive sport.”

Hell, she got her doctorate by completing “an ethnographic study of the subworld of competitive equestrian sport, focusing specifically on gender within a sport in which men and women compete against each other on equal terms.”

Given Morozov’s demolition of gibberish-spouting Internet guru Jeff Jarvis, I’d love to see him take on this kind of nonsense, which is at the core of my “Beyond Title IX.” But this would be no challenge to Morozov, who seems to be amused by Dashper’s verbiage and the ascension of her field, and that’s about it.

I no longer shake my head, especially when even SB Nation gave Dashper some uncritical mention about gender-blending among equestrian riders during the London Olympics.

Yes, SB Nation.

I really wanted to like today’s SB Nation Longform piece, “Why Sports Matter,” because answering this question is the chief reason for me revamping this blog.

And then I clicked on the link to discover the following as the true headline: “Obama vs. Romney: The hot shot vs. the GM.”

For the love of God.

I feel tricked, if not betrayed. While the story, written by former New York State legislator Richard Brodsky, is well-done and evocative, it’s an attempt to answer the original question in a purely political context, to draw understandable attention (and eyeballs) a couple of weeks before a very close presidential election.

The candidates’ love for sports is undeniable and genuine, and I don’t take issue with how Brodsky discusses what sports have meant to the biography of each man. But then I read this:

“Sports remain a window to the American soul; fandom and participation are valid measures of leadership.”

What about the rest of us? Brodsky explains what he learned about market ideology by playing lacrosse at Brandeis, but doesn’t offer a glimpse into the window of his soul.

And that’s what’s missing from this otherwise noble attempt to flesh out this overarching question — why do sports matter to so many of us? — to a campaign for the White House.

There really is no connection, and we have to go back to “The Joy of Sports” to find where the kernels of truth really reside. Michael Novak knows where, and it contains no ideology or political creed. It is, he asserts, “The Natural Religion,” which must by necessity be detached from raw political realities:

“Sports are our chief civilizing agent. Sports are our most universal art form. Sports tutor us in the basic lived experiences of the humanist tradition.

“The hunger for perfection in sports cleaves closely to the driving core of the human spirit.”

After the election, perhaps Brodsky can take another stab at it from this perspective, and not the one he has chosen today.

I’ve never watched an innings of cricket. Nor have I opened one of the many books written about it, both fiction and non-fiction, that reveal the long history and deep lore of a sport as synonymous with the peak of the British Empire as baseball is with the rise of the modern American nation.

But after luxuriating in Elizabeth Minkel’s recent piece on The Millions, a fabulous book site, about the “rich literary vein” of cricket, I can’t wait to dig into a few volumes to help me better understand a sport that seems exotic.

My only direct brush with cricket — and it was nothing more than that — came during the 2000 Summer Olympics. I was covering soccer matches played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and with a spare hour or two toured the attached museum that’s a shrine to the Australian version of the game. Near the entrance is a statue of Don Bradman, the legendary batsman who penned a noted memoir about his years in the sport.

He appeared to be a ringer for Ty Cobb. My baseball brain, transported halfway around the world, couldn’t switch into a foreign mode to appreciate what was before me. I wasn’t the best international traveler on that trip — it was a three-week working assignment — but I filed away my brief introduction to cricket somewhere in the back of my mind.

So I read Minkel’s examination with renewed interest. She cites quite a few books, even dating back to Dickens and including P.G. Wodehouse, among other British literary luminaries, in her lengthy primer. Then she gets to what appears to be the tipping point:

“The literary history of cricket, in turn, is a lesson in colonialism and post-colonialism. Cricket enthusiasts began building the sport’s narrative in the Victorian era—they wanted it to represent the idea of a near-fictional England, with an emphasis on the rural and the ancient, a construction that they exported to the farthest reaches of the British Empire. The sport was—and still is—imbued with a deep sense of morality.”

In the same paragraph, she references “Beyond a Boundary,” by the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, as not just “politics by cricket,” but also “one of the greatest sports books of all time.”

Okay, then, I’m up for that, since I especially enjoy reading books by authors who have a very different philosophical perspective. I’m going to learn about a sport I know nothing about from a writer with whom I disagree politically.

There are other endorsements for “Beyond a Boundary,” including this one as the best cricket book of all time. There are more, here, here and here, that more or less promise accessibility, so we’ll see. Then there’s this from the writer Joseph O’Neill, author of “Netherland,” set in New York and containing a cricket component:

“Of course, it’s quite possible to enjoy a piece of writing while remaining at a loss about much of what it means: Think of the murky pleasure to be derived from leafing through, say, the poems of Neruda with nothing but a smattering of Mediterraneanese (that quasi-language comprising remembered bits of French, Italian, and Spanish) to draw on.”

O’Neill says “Beyond a Boundary” doesn’t go to those extremes, so I suppose I’m sold on reading this.

Minkel also recommends “Netherland,” along with so many other titles, including literary criticism of cricket literature. The genre is this rich, as she claims, and it’s astonishing to realize how vastly uneducated Americans are about a sport that reaches many more corners of the world than our beloved baseball ever will.

But one book at a time. And some viewing needs to be in order in this age of online streaming. I’ve been seeing a bit of cricket seem into the American sports social media bloodstream in recent weeks, especially about Twenty20 cricket, an abridged version, if you will, that’s extremely lucrative in the Indian and Pakistani hotbeds for the sport.

What a joy this figures to be.

On the fantastic Bookforum Omnivore blog I found this argument by essayist and author Pamela Haag about why Americans should pay more attention to sports than to presidential politics.

Sports, she claims, better reflect the values we used to believe we could find in campaigns:

“Sports earn our attention and devotion, while this presidential election has not. The political stakes are so high today, and the politics are so very low. The presidential contest is increasingly a self-referential, insular reality TV show for the wonkish and politically inclined. Presidential politics are to the real world as the WWF is to real sports.

“Meanwhile, sports exhibit competition within the parameters of consistently-applied rules and respect for the competition; they model teamwork and cooperation and graciousness in defeat; the outcome isn’t known beforehand and is arrived at fairly.”

Well, if she watched a steady stream of booyah highlights on SportsCenter or listened to enough critics of the Bowl Championship Series, she might amend her remarks.

But Haag’s general point — that those who diminish sports as being lesser than more “serious” pursuits, such as politics, and who view them as trifling, are missing what many of us — and not just avid sports fans — instinctively feel when we watch the games. It’s pure meritocracy in action, and a renewal of communal bonding that’s hard to replicate:

“Finally, sports unify cities and towns across differences. Baltimore was without a football team for over a decade. Now that we have one, we all have something passionate that we really care about to discuss with people who don’t live in our tiny sliver of a demographic. Cab drivers talk as peers with Hopkins physicists about the Ravens, and so on. We unify as something bigger than a fractious collection of individuals or niches around our passion for a team.”

Jaded souls — especially some residing in Cleveland — may take issue with this contention.

Last week, when Omnivore produced a curated cluster of sports links, it also included this review on the Inside Higher Ed website of a recent book, “Global Sport: A Barbaric Plague,” which, as the title suggests, generally condemns the world’s sports fanaticism.

French academic scold Marc Perelman issues a litany of complaints about sports — “the opium of the people” — embodying the worst of capitalism, sexual repression, racism and more. This is hardly a new argument, but Perelman takes it to a new level. And this is too much even for leftist American sports-and-politics advocate Dave Zirin, who smartly points out examples of massive social and cultural change deriving in sports, especially Jackie Robinson and Title IX.

Though I’ve never been a fan of Zirin’s for perpetually injecting political boilerplate into the heart of the sports realm, at least he has an understanding of what makes a sports fan tick:

“I don’t think Perelman really appreciates that the number one reason people watch sports isn’t because they are brain-dead sheep, but because they derive joy from the experience. And in our society, for far too many people, joy is in short supply.”

Sexual assault charges against two members of Boston University’s wildly successful ice hockey team have prompted the usual media hand-wringing on the meaning of it all in a societal context.

So naturally, we must have a quote like this one in The New York Times today, from Dan Lebowitz of the Center for Sport in Society at nearby Northeastern University:

“This is about a male culture and how we have a construct that’s wrong. It transcends sport. It’s about how are men going to be held responsible for the way they treat women. We focus almost entirely on how tough they are. We don’t pay nearly enough attention to compassion, to kindness, to respect for women.”

No, it’s not about “a male culture.” It’s about two individuals who have been charged — not convicted — of crimes against women. The defendants were college athletes at the time of their arrests.

It’s one thing for BU to set up a task force to examine the “hockey culture” of the men’s progam — universities are notoriously sheepish about doing this in the wake of such events.

What’s paramount is that this is matter for law enforcement and the judicial system, not academics and pundits grinding out their tiresome sociological axe before the guilt or innocence of the accused men is proven.

Should the charges against them get to court, none of the claptrap that Lebowitz and other sports sociologists like to peddle should be uttered in the official proceedings.

Prosecutors must prove that the two defendants, who’ve been kicked off the team and have pleaded not guilty, did sexually assault women. That is all.

But Lebowitz’s assertions might come in handy for the defense, should the evidence be so overwhelming that absolute guilt must be admitted. A hypothetical argument that could be made, based on Lebowitz’ claims:

“Well, yes, they did do it, but a socially constructed male athletic culture made them do it. Otherwise, these are great kids who never got into any trouble with the law.

“When they first laced up their skates to play for one of the top hockey programs in the country, they had no way of knowing that they too would become victims of this malignant cultural construct.

“Yes, they’ve been cocooned in a hegemonic masculinist sports team setting that ignores respect for women and awards macho toughness. On and off the ice. If only we could change this culture, we wouldn’t have more tragedies like this one.

“They are guilty as charged, but the male sports culture is the real culprit. We can’t put that on trial here, so we must reconstruct it. Because culture, as we all know, should be as easy to change as underwear. I know, I know, this isn’t a matter for the court.

“But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, these men are guilty, this we know. And as you consider their sentence, don’t forget that they are guilty by reason of the patriarchy. Show some kindness, some compassion for their plight. Please.”

In all seriousness, Lebowitz and his ideological handmaidens in the sports feminist community have been putting the male sports culture on trial for decades now, getting a free ride from major media outlets like the Times to cement unanimous convictions in the kangaroo courts of their own minds.

Most male athletes do not commit crimes — against women, men or children — and they leave their aggression behind at the rinks, fields and courts of play.

But mostly, what is being contended here absolves individuals of their actions.

Individuals charged with crimes must be prosecuted as individuals, not as members of groups accused of producing a hothouse environment for crime, misogyny and mayhem to flower.

The legal guilt or innocence of these two young men doesn’t matter to those like Lebowitz, well-schooled in the art of making sure their pronouncements get ahead of the truth, and stay there.

But what a great gig he’s got, perched in a cushy academic “research” center where he can say whatever he wants. The veracity of his claims will not be questioned, but instead amplified by the highest-profile newspaper in the land.